Day 2 Street Cleaning

Southwest Corner of the Temple Mount with original stones from Herod the Great's construction.




Wailing Wall or Western Wall of Temple Mount, Jerusalem. This is the women's area.


Today we nearly completed removing rubble around the paving stones in our little square. See the results in the photo at the right!

OK, actually we didn't quite get this much done and photos of our progress are not available yet (because someone forgot their camera at 5:00 AM this morning - what was I thinking!)

I did make 2 fun finds today. One was a pottery handle that was in two pieces. I showed it to my site supervisor who looked at it for a split second and stated it was a cooking pot handle and tossed it into the collection of other broken pottery shards we collect each day. Not deterred by the casual dismissal of my find, I later unearthed a diamond shaped piece of floor tile. It was only one piece about 2" x 2" but was a different kind of find from our usual pieces of pottery. Once again it was tossed without ceremony to the 'find' bucket. [Never give up! Never surrender!] The real excitement at our site involved the removal of a reconstructed wall built by the excavators in the 1960's. We realized after looking at the strata behind the wall (and under our flooring) that a much earlier floor was visible about 3 feet below our Byzantine floor. I guess we have a lot more work ahead of us!

This afternoon about 40 of us took a trip into Jerusalem and explored some of the archeology of the city. The street photo above is REALLY the main street of ancient Jerusalem (Roman era) that runs beside the western wall of Herod's temple mount retaining wall. (The wall is not visible in the photo but is to the right.) The boulders you see fell from the ancient top of the retaining wall when the Romans destroyed the temple in 70 CE.